


My Best Girl

by MurasakibaraAoi



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Adoption, Father Figures, Father-Daughter Relationship, Female Peter, Gen, Genderbend, Genderbending, Irondad, Other, Peter is a girl, fem!Peter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-10-24 17:28:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17708573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MurasakibaraAoi/pseuds/MurasakibaraAoi
Summary: Tony can count with one hand the number of things he has wanted in his life, but has never been able to get.His father’s love and affection was the first thing.Then, there was Mary Fitzpatrick.As time went by, Peter looked less like Mary and more like Richard. This is something that anyone who had known the Parkers could confirm.For all Tony cared, genetics could go suck it.She could grow to have a Parker’s nose and jawline. Peter could have their ears and their horrible taste in baseball teams, could go change her eyes from Mary's brown to Richard's green, and none of that would matter. At the end of the day, she was still Tony’s.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the longest chapter of anything I have written in my entire life, but I hope you enjoy it.

There is a boiling point for the whole thing, but it starts like this. 

Tony is a smartass, he knows it.

He knows it, and takes pleasure on making other people notice, if there wasn’t enough attention on him as it already was. He can remember people pointing at him when, as a fifteen year old, he moved to the MIT dormitory while sporting sunglasses and two teachers trying to keep up with his fast strides, throwing compliments right and left and making it as clear as possible that they would do anything for his dad to even know their names. There would be a problem with that, he obviously said, because he had forgotten about their names himself.

So the teachers dislike him even before he goes to the first class, and at least half of the male students population dislike him when he comments on the already smelly air inside the dormitory, loudly wondering if anyone there was aware of personal hygiene or if it was something they had learn from a textbook too. He has an uptight looking roommate, one that nods sternly but otherwise does not even blink when he finds out that the boy prodigy is going to sleep on the same room as him for the next couple of years, but James Rhodes cracks a smile when he sees the ACDC concert ticket that Tony uses as a book mark, and the teenager supposes it’s a good sign when the guy laughs two weeks in when ‘Rhodey’ just slips out of Tony’s mouth as he asks what they are going to have for dinner.

He would probably never forget the fact that he was the first person he managed to get on his side through his charms and sly comments, instead of his money and the Stark name.

The other guys were not as easily charmed.

“You walk around like you own the place” Says a guy with both ridiculous and irritating curly red hair one day, almost spitting on his face. The color it’s awful, and Tony has an itching to reach up and tug at it, just to see if it’s a wig that can come off. He would be doing the guy a favor, and he says as much, but it’s the thing that got him in this position in the first place; cornered besides a stone staircase inside the campus.  

“I am pretty sure my old man’s name is on some placard around here, so technically, I kind of do-“

“You know, the magazines always forget to add some things. ‘Tony Stark, the brat who would be nothing without his daddy’”

“Oh, so you read those? I am betting you were looking for the hair style tips and tricks section. Try them on yourself often, for what I can see”

Tony is smart, but it doesn’t mean he manages to say smart things most of the time. That’s what Rhodey usually says when he has to stop teachers from expelling the teenager and when he has to stop himself from smothering him on his sleep, and Tony can say that he agrees with at least thirty percent of that statement- Speaking of which, he sees Rhodey running towards them from over behind the two guys surrounding him at the same time he sees the curly haired one’s face turning as red as his head. He also sees how his other arm raises and how his fingers curl in a fist, and knows that well, at least he can sue him if he breaks his nose.

Then there is a splash, and the guy looks like a drowned cat. Droplets of water hit Tony’s face as he stumbles to the ground, because the guy releases his shirt as he jumps back and actually _squeals_

“Oh dear, how clumsy of me”

Tony looks up and up and up, until he can see the person standing on the stairs. There are hands and arms leaning over the railing, brown her falling over a thin shoulder, an amused smile screeching even more when the guys spluttered and curses, and brown eyes taking in the whole scene with great pleasure. He takes one look at the girl and he knows she is, maybe, as young as himself, but maybe it was the laughter already bubbling out of her mouth what made her look like the kind of person MIT didn’t exactly welcome with open arms. It reminded him of himself.

“Fitzpatrick!” The curly haired guy shot, red on the face and neck and looking more like a tomato with every passing second “What the hell are you doing!?”

The girl didn’t even flinch at the loud sound of the other guy’s voice, instead, she pointed her finger at a direction that looked as random as any to Tony “You might want to dry off darling, I think I saw your Robotics teacher walking just around that corner, and we don’t want him thinking you went for a swim on the fountain _again,_ do we now, Neal? I heard he is the one signing your recommendation letter”

 _Neal_ splutters and turns even redder than before and tries to curse, but he is trying to do that all at the same time he quickly walks away, his sidekick trailing behind him, so it doesn’t really have an effect in any of them. Rhodey helps him get to his feet, but Tony is already looking up at the girl while dusting off his clothes, taking in her laugh as she steps away from the railing and starts to walk down the stair.

“Yeah, thanks, but I could have handled it on my own”

“I know. But then I would have missed all the fun” She skipped the last step, walking towards them not a second after she landed on the floor, hands dusting off her arms from the time she had been leaning against the railing. She is taller than him, but not taller than Rhodey, but when he looked down there were no heels on her feet- Actually, he was a hundred perfect sure those were men shoes in a very small size “You two gentlemen have a name?”

“James Rhodes” Rhodey, of course, is the first one to answer, because his mother has shaken manners into the core of his very existence, and also because he is starting to step up as the babysitter Tony apparently needed “And this is-“

“You heard how they called me, you know my name”

He hears his friend curse at him, muttering something about manners and whatnot.

Tony really doesn’t care.

“Actually, I believe I know your _dad’s_ name, not yours. Seems like a pretty big difference right there”

It was unnerving, to be honest.

It was unnerving because she had not even looked at him while saying that, still rolling up the sleeves of her shirt as if honestly were the kind of thing you said to the son of a billionaire who had been the talk of campus since he got there, but it was the first time in his life he heard something remotely similar to that statement. So the teenager blinked at her like she had grown another head, he blinked at her busy hands and he blinked at her brown hair, he blinked until her sleeves were settled satisfactorily and she returned his gaze, obviously waiting for an answer and surely expecting a smart comment of some sorts.

He opens his mouth and expects the same.

“Tony”

Rhodey blinks in surprise.

Tony wonders why he even answered.

The girl smiles.

“Mary Fitzpatrick. Lovely to meet you both”

When he was proven right, Tony was not surprised.

Mary wasn’t fifteen like him, but her seventeen was enough of a difference between most of the students of their university. Tony knew this because he saw how people looked at her when she walked through the campus as if she had not seen more than one girl waiting for the best moment to push her around, or splash the skirt of her dress as he had seen so many times before- It was, after all, a smaller and less intense version of how people usually looked at him before he got into a fight, or just after answering correctly during classes, two things that seemed to go hand in hand these days. There were just so much of whispering and gossiping he could handle until he rolled his eyes so profoundly they almost rolled their way out of his face.

Immature, the lot of them.

So he just scoffs and goes on with his day, because it’s very much no his problem. Rhodey seems to disagree, as he constantly does, because there are such things as gratitude and human relations and a bunch of other stuff he stresses on. Tony does not have the interest to care.

Until he does.

He walks by the Biological Engineering department on his way to skipping yet another useless class when he catches sight of long brown hair braided around an almost tiny head, just inside an AP classroom. It is not her hair what makes Tony stop and look, nor it was the red clothe tied around her curls. It was the fact that Mary Fitzpatrick sat at the very front of the glass, eyes framed with glasses, and without a single soul seated in a radius of at least four desks around her. This, though, didn’t come off as such a surprise given the fact that, as far as he could tell, she was the only girl inside the classroom.

And now, she was the only one answering a question.

She also was the only one being glared at.

When the class is over and she walks out, Mary finds him lying across a bench besides one of the buildings.

“What does your dad do?”

She doesn’t even blink.

“Translation”

“So why do you do science?”

Now, she does blink, and after that, she laughs.

“Art was never really my thing”

They eat ice cream after that. Rhodey joins them after the third time they sneak off campus, and it doesn’t really stop nor gets limited to ice cream after some time. Tony charms their way into the kitchen and they manage to not burn it down the few times they use it, and Mary knows how to talk to the librarian so he lets them use one of the bigger study rooms for more time than they should be allowed to use. On winter break he is sipping juice in the living room of his house, no parents or particularly meaningful Christmas decoration in sight, when Jarvis walks in and hands him a postal card with a drawing of snowman and a stamp of Queens- She is over at her grandmother’s, and has decided that cherries are better than strawberries.

When they go back to MIT after the break, Tony gives her a box of strawberries and his home’s phone number, because ‘what I am even supposed to do with a postal card after I’ve already read it, Fitzpatrick? You are more practical than that’.  Mary makes smoothies with the strawberries, and even though it ends up on some asshole’s hair and clothes, Rhodey thinks it’s the best use that smoothie could have had (Secretly, Tony does bring cherries inside the campus, but he does not let it be known until Mary is too stressed over her tests and does not notice what he was been eating until she has gone through two entire boxes).

When Tony gets drunk for the first time at the tender age of seventeen, Mary throws freezing cold sprite on his face while Rhodey stumbles out of the way, and she does not even blink at his coughing until he is sober enough to see that she is  silently crying, still holding the glass in one trembling hand. Mary cries like he has seen his mother only cry once- There is no redness on her cheeks, there is no sniffing, and the tears looks like pearls falling from her eyes. Is single handedly the most beautiful thing he was seen in his life, and even though it wasn’t love at first sight, it counts enough for Tony to never drink again when Mary is close enough to see him getting wasted.

When Mary graduates, she wears a blue dress.

Tony wears a blue tie.

Rhodey insists he must be the one taking the pictures, so he doesn’t get any blue clothing. Tony makes sure to replace all of his boxers with blue ones the day before.

“We will make this world a better place” Says Mary when she can finally kick off her heels, walking over the side of the campus’ main fountain with diploma in one hand and shoes in the other, because it’s not like she can get spelled from doing anything anymore. She kicks out some water, and twirls around “Aren’t we, Tony?”

He thinks about weapons. He thinks about bombs and guns and wars.

“Yeah”

That’s the only thing he can say.

It’s not the last time he sees Mary. She calls frequently, and does nothing more than to laugh and buy him an ice cream when he tells her he is already halfway through his first PhD’s classes- When he goes to study abroad, he makes two phones, because he doesn't trust normal house phones to be as efficient as he wanted and needed them to be for this particular task. One is blue, and one is pink, and there is absolutely no doubt in his mind when he uses one of Howard Stark's military connections to get the pink phone all the way to Afganistan, where Rhodey was deployed a few months before. The guy is not amused, but Mary is very much so, and Tony listens to her own Master Degree story three seconds after a girl slapped him and stumbled out of his bed and room, because there is an other of  priorities in his life and remembering that her names was Candice is quite enough, so he obviously opts for picking up the phone rather than cuddle and whatnot.

It’s a warmth he doesn’t necessarily miss when he steps out of the plane on December 10th, and sees Jarvis owning Mary at Go Fish, the cards over the hood of the very expensive car that takes them right into his mother’s sitting room. Rhodey will be there tomorrow, because of course Howard Stark has arranged a trip for his wife and him the day after his oh so beloved son comes back from studying abroad. When the man sees Mary the morning they leave, as his mom is playing the piano and Tony is nursing a headache due to jet lack, she is sitting crossed leg on a coach playing a game of chess against herself- He remembers his dad asking if she was Williams Fitzpatrick’s daughter, and he remembers Mary apologizing for not sending an invitation to the funeral. He also remembers not asking anything else about it, because it wasn’t a piece of information even his dad had felt like talking about.

“Hello, Miss Fitzpatrick”

“Good morning, Mr. Stark”

It’s too cold to go swimming, so they stay inside and Rhodey makes his mom’s hot chocolate, which tastes better than anything Tony and Mary combined can come up with besides instant noodles and strawberry smoothies, so they pretend they are surviving on that until Jarvis comes and calls them for lunch. Rhodey plans on leaving in a week, then it becomes ‘a week and something’ for no apparent reason more than the fact that they eat so much they wake up with stomachache, just to eat some more and lay on the living room’s floor, legs and feet resting on the sofas.

The phone is not the thing that wakes Tony up.

Mary’s head is nestled on his stomach and Rhodey’s head has positively cut the circulation on his right arm, but that’s not what woke him up either, but he stays there and does not move for quite a while. Jarvis is the one who opens the door, that he can see from where he is on the floor, but Obadiah is the one who strides in- Voices come from the other room, and he is not entirely sure why there is an army of lawyers in his house when he has just woken up from eating his weight on ice cream, the tubs and boxes scattered all over around them, but he knows he wants to go back to last night when the only thing to worry about was how to hide the stain of chocolate ice cream on the coach from Jarvis.

He does not remember much about the funeral.

At least half of it can be attributed to the more than half bottle of whiskey he downed in less time than it took him drink a cup of tea, and so, there is little recollection of what happened between the moment he stepped towards the mini bar and the moment he was expected to step out of the limo and into the church, which was ironic, because his dad had never believed in anyone besides himself. But he does remember little bits and pieces, that is how he knows Rhodey does not, in fact, go back home, and nor does Mary.

This is how he knows that he was basically dressed by Jarvis.

This also is how he knows that when Obadiah stepped forward and between Tony and his friends, Tony looked up and said “If you make take them away, I will punch someone in the face”

Mary does not tell him not to drink, she does not join him either. But she does sit with him on the floor with their backs against the sofa, without saying a word until she pointed towards her feet. She is barefoot and is wearing blue socks, matching the socks Tony did not realize he was wearing. He stares at them for the rest of the night.

Tony does not remember if he cries.

Mary does not tell him if that was the case.

Rhodey pretends he was asleep on the coach all along.

It’s also how, maybe, Mary pretends to be working on some projects when Tony calls her from the other side of the world, saying that sleep is for the weak and she was by no means a weak woman, and that he might as well talk because she can also multitask and she was up anyway. That’s how he pretends he has an incredibly important thing to report instead of complaining about the lack of variety of smoothies that are offered in the places near his dormitory. It’s not whiskey what makes him forget most of the time what the calls are about, or how many times he calls until he sees the phone records, but most often than not Vodka and Rum have to do with it.

Tony also does not remember how much time he had originally said it would take him to finish his PhDs, but when he does finish them it’s still not the time to take over Stark Industries, and, he supposes, that’s the kind of thing that calls for newspaper articles. The articles themselves, he also supposes, are not what makes his ego grow too much, regardless of what might seem like judging by the cocky smile on each and every of those pictures, but Mary thinks they are, as she cuts them off the newspaper and arranges them inside the same albums she storage Tony and Rhodey’s first graduation picture- The albums are neatly arranged, and through the years, they grow in number and thickness.  After a while, it goes from a joke between them to the place Tony places the photo of a Mary wearing a newly acquired white coat, working for a laboratory whose name Tony saves for future reference. He makes her wear it when he takes her out of dinner for it

Because time does not stop, and it keeps going until Obie is showing him his new office in Malibu. It does not stop and keeps going until it’s time for Jarvis’ relatives to be the ones comforted, as Tony pays for the only funeral he is willing to see through without a drop of alcohol in his system.  It does not stop until, a few years later, Rhodey has at least one more medal than he did when he was first deployed.

It does not stop until Mary is dressed in a different kind of white.

To the end of his days, Tony considers that day to be the most mature one of his life. There is no vodka nor rum running through his bloodstream as Mary straightened his tie, the only blue piece of clothing in the whole ceremony that matched her earrings and her necklace, and grinned from ear to ear, shaking her feet from under the skirt of her pristine dress, moments before he had to offer her his arm and give her away.

That’s what happens, he guessed, when you are still the best friend after ten years (Ten years, three months, seventeen days and nine hours, but who is counting?)

“Do you think someone would notice if I walked down the aisle barefoot?”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Would it matter if they did?”

She snorts, and it doesn’t even sound like a snort to his ears.

“This is why I love you, Tony”

 _I love you too_.

It wouldn’t be the first time he said it.

But this wasn’t, no matter how much he wanted to change the scenery, one of those days in which they drove through the city, rating ice cream parlors and discussing ‘how many PhDs are enough, Tony?’ while simultaously agreeing that green was very much not his color. This wasn’t a graduation ceremony, in which they matched shoes and suits and colors just to laugh at however looked at them in the wrong way. This was not one of those moments in which she would smile ever so slightly, shake her head, and say ‘I know’- Because Mary knew it, just like Tony knew that her kind of love was never going to be the same as his. Just like Tony knew that it didn’t matter that it wasn’t, because in that little world of drives and ice cream and graduation pictures, Mary was still his, in the same way Rhodey was, the same way his father never let himself be.

This was her wedding.

And because it was her wedding, Tony could only say “I love me too”

That, too, wasn’t the last time he saw Mary.

Over the years, the newspapers try to make something big out of it. 

But the thing they didn’t know, was this: Tony has a habit of collecting family, like one would safeguard a rare collection of stamps or cans or whatever other collectable object. He also has a habit of building them, Dum-E being the moving and beeping proof of that, but he has not yet found a way of creating humans, so he finds the few that tolerate him and not his money, takes a hold and does not let go- He tries to explain this to a not so recently hired Happy one time as he accompanies him to buy Mary’s birthday present, because it was not the kind of thing you delegate to other people, but its also the kind of thing that makes his bodyguard ask ‘With all due respect, sir, why do you do this to yourself?’. And there is no way of answering that without sounding horrible, but he was an awfully egoistical son of a bitch, and so Tony answered sincerely that even if Rhodey got married tomorrow, more significantly than some woman’s husband, he was Tony’s.

And Tony took care of the things he loved. His mother’s piano, Jarvis and his grave, Rhodey and his loyalty, Mary and her support. ‘Someday you might as well be included in that little list’ He had said, and laughed at Happy’s facial expression.

This is the reason why he all but kicks down an office door before walking towards the biggest desk in sight, newspaper in hand, completely ignoring the gasps and screams and stares of the rest of the people inside that office. He slams the newspaper on the desk, leans forward to an increasingly pale man, and points at the picture on the front page, displaying a laughing Tony escorting an equally laughing Mary.

“You can call me a play boy all you want, it wouldn’t be inaccurate” It wasn’t a whisper, but Tony Stark didn’t need to scream to get his point across “But if you ever call that woman one of my lovers again, I am going to end you and your shitty newspaper, do you understand me?”

It’s not the first time it happens.

But it’s the first time it happens after Richard has basically smuggled himself in their world. So Tony does the next most rational thing and picks up the phone.

“This is Richard Par-“

“I swear this is not-“

“Tony?”

“It will be off every single newspaper by tomorrow mo-“

“Tony, I can almost hear you having a heart attack. Calm down. Do you want to come down and have some breakfast?”

“You haven’t seen it yet?”

“Come on, of course I saw it. It made for a wonderful paper plane, we will show it to you when you come. Pancakes okay with you?”

He does not want to like Richard. Tony only wants to be civil, to get along sufficiently so to not make Mary suggest for a second time in their lives that maybe it was easier for both of them if she just stayed away, but he does not want to like him. Tony thinks that the thing he hates about Richard the most, is the fact that he cannot hate him at all, this being the conclusion he came to when Mary tells him that Richard has, in fact, refused to sell their research to Oscorp even though it’s soon to be CEO, Norman Osborn, was his college friend.

“There is no point on the privatization of health” Was his very simple answer, while he sorted through an arrangement of papers on DNA and cross species and cure for hereditary deceases, as Tony did nothing but to munch on a stolen waffle. That and thinking that weapons maybe weren’t the only way to protect people, and that maybe it was time to invest on another field.

Richard does not become Tony’s, but he is Mary’s, so that’s close enough.

When Tony hires Pepper as his personal assistant, after she makes herself noticed by pointing out a mistake made by Tony himself while working as a simple secretary, Tony sees Mary chatting with the strawberry blonde just outside his office while handing a box that surely contained a cake, but when he tries to grab the box, Mary waves his hands away.

“No, this is not for you, this is for Ms. Potts”

“Me?”

“You are taking care of this one over here” Mary smiles, laughs, and points at Tony “It takes a lot. You are a very strong woman”

It’s good, he thinks, that Pepper likes Mary. It’s good because when Mary tells him she is pregnant, it takes Tony three days to get sober, and another two until Pepper finds him in a bar before dragging his ass out and throwing him in his backyard’s pool. Even though _Rhodey_ had been the one doing the dragging and the throwing, it was Pepper Tony could remember, standing behind his best friend with arms crossed over her chest and disappointed written all over her face.

“She is not three months pregnant, and she has been crying her eyes out for the past five days because no one could find you. I am not letting a baby die just because you cannot pull it together”

Tony thinks Richard is definitely going to punch him. He is waiting for it, almost willing it to happen, when the guy opens their apartment’s door to see Tony standing outside with a basket of sweet potatoes, broccoli and every single vegetable Pepper said was good for pregnancies- The billionaire takes off his glasses before it can happen, and prays he pisses the nose, but Richard takes one look at him before throwing his arms around Tony.

“You and I are going to talk about the benefits of a healthy liver after this”

To be honest, Tony would have preferred to be hit, maybe that way, he would have pain as a distraction to Mary’s running nose and tears. The tears are still beautiful, but he is not exactly in the position to be captivated by them like a teenager all over again, so he does the next sensible thing and sits besides her on the coach where she has stayed silent the whole time. The man places the basket on her lap, and takes out of his pocket the few baby pamphlets he stole from the only drug store he has stepped in since he was in college. There is a crappy cartoon of a pacifier drawn on the cover, but it’s something to look at, and for that he is grateful.

“What is it? A boy? A girl? A lobster?”

Mary smiles, sniffs, laughs and shakes her head.

“I don’t know yet”

She eats half of the stuff that is in the basket, and he feels compelled on apologize to her husband when she throws it all up not ten minutes later.

He goes to two doctor appointments, because Richard is away on conferences and he calls Tony to demand a detailed report of every single thing said and done during the consultation. Mary laughs through the whole thing, snatching his sunglasses one more than one occasion with an amused grin on her face.

“Can you make a mini pair?”

“Why would I want to make a mini pair?”

“Well, for Peter, of course”

“So a boy. Mazel tov”

“Oh no, she is a girl”

“Are you going to be one of those parents who ruin their kid’s life with innapropiate names?”

“Oh, you bet. Wait until I decide on a second name”

Tony, logically, knows how babies look like. He catches a glance of them once or twice as Happy drives him around, but there is never enough time or interested (mainly interest) for him to actually interact with anyone under thirty. So as they stand in the a store littered with tiny little things and tiny little clothes and ridiculously big stuffed animals, he is left to stare at a pair of tiny shoes while wondering just what on earth they make them if children weren’t even supposed to be walking at the age the label says. He would know, because Mary made him sit with her as she read maternity book upon maternity book.

To his right, Rhodey pulls out a stuffed giraffe.

“What about this one?”

Tony does not get to answer before his phone starts ringing.

“ _She is here_!”

 _She_ weighted around five pounds, had much more hair than Tony though was physically possible for a newborn, and made Mary smile like he had never seen anyone smile before.

“She is beautiful”

Mary is tired, but she has not let any nurse take the bundle away from her. Tony has not discarded his shoes, but he is still sitting right beside her on the hospital bed, legs thrown over the covers.

  
“She looks like a little grandma”

“Then she is the most beautiful grandma I have seen in my entire life” Mary snorts and Tony says it’s unbecoming of a mother, so she snorts again and straightens as much as she possibly can in the surely uncomfortable hospital bed. She is not going to stay there much longer, and so he doesn’t ask for a better room- He is also grateful, because he prefers to steal from Richard’s food than the hospital one served besides the bed. He wrinkles his nose at what he supposed was mashed potatoes “Come on, hold her for a while”

He immediately shakes his head and points at his suit.

“No thank you. Armani”

“It wasn’t a question”

Tony, logically, knows how babies look like. He remembers the tiny clothes on the store and the tiny socks and the tiny shoes and he thinks that they would all be too big on the human he is currently holding. It feels like he is holding nothing at all, and it’s a terrifying thought for anyone, even someone that didn’t want children of his own like Tony Stark- Peter does not wake up and barely moves, but she does curl in on herself even more, very tiny fists covered in tiny gloves that don’t look small enough to fit properly. He looks at her face, while praying to however is listening to him that she does not actually shower him in bodily fluid, and wonders if her eyes are green like Richard’s or brown like Mary’s, and that’s how said man finds him when he walks inside the room with a new bag of clothes and even more stuffed toys.

Tony feels like he felt when the whole newspaper thing tried to make a big deal out of their friendship.

Because this was his baby and the woman whose bed he was currently sitting on was his wife, and yes, she has his something too, but it was maybe a little bit too much even for his own standards. The billionaire tries to avoid the other man’s eyes as much as possible as he turns towards Mary.

“Ehhh, how do I put her down”

But Richard is the one who laughs. He laughs, drops the things he is carrying on one chair in the corner of the room, and walks close. But he does not take his baby- Instead, he fixes the blanket around her, and laughs again.

“I think no place is safer for her right now”

Tony groans, because he is trying to be the good guy here.

“I respectfully disagree”

It is put to the test a second after that, when Peter suddenly moves and squirms and jerks her little arms out in a very uncoordinated way. Tony is frozen in place, not moving an inch and thinking that maybe if he didn’t breathe either his arms would stay in place and not let her fall, but the kid keeps on moving until she turns her face towards his chest, an arm raised in what has to be an uncomfortable angle. He is three seconds away from commenting on her early appreciation for contortionism when he caught eye of the tag carefully fixed around her small wrist.

It’s an ugly shade of yellow, and it’s a very little, unassuming object. But it’s the thing written on it what has him staring at the tag as if were the first time in his life he saw letters.

‘Peter Antonella Parker Fitzpatrick’

“Well, what do you think, _Anthony_?”

“Oh, shut up, Filomena”

“Not my name”

“It should be”

Richard just laughs.

The thing is, Tony does not have to like Peter.

The crying at night, the diapers, the bottles, the nights spent cradling her to sleep instead of doing something productive helped the idea, and for once he didn't envy Richard when he tried to figure out how to make the little being burp. But the thing also is, Peter is Mary's, and Mary still is Tony's, so he doesn't have to like the kid, but he still is around her more time than what he spends listening to his board of directors. It’s definitely more time than what he spends listening to Obie when he goes on and on about lousy details he has no intention of even remembering, something his friend and colleague reminds him of way too often, but it’s not Tony’s fault.

It's his very own brand of masochism what forces him to be there when she learns how to sit. The kid grows fast, and the thing also is, Peter does not _cry_. If she falls, she wails, and if she gets hurt, it’s also the same case, but if not then she prefers to use incomprehensible sounds to communicate instead of tears and screaming, which Tony is grateful for every time he is nursing a headache and too hangover to care if the kid sits on his stomach or pulls at his facial hair.  He is not too sure of how old she is, because he doesn’t keep track of it like he does with Mary’s birthday, but she is still wearing diapers when he knows the lack of crying is not exactly the most uncommon thing about the brat.

“If she is just any normal kid, living on to go to a normal school and having normal grades, its okay. It really doesn’t matter if she is a genius or not” He remembers Mary say more than once, because science magazines are having a field trip with the whole thing, wondering and theorizing about the result of the marriage between two of the greatest DNA researches of their times. Tony has seen the darker comments, nonsense about breeding and Peter being talked about more like a test subject than like a child, and he knows he does not only have his own fame to worry about, but at least Mary is not dealing with it alone “She is a healthy child, she is safe, and that’s everything we could ask for”

But he is there when it happens. He is there because it’s his office and he has realized that if he has the child nearby, then Obie and the rest of the board avoid the room like the plague. Mary is using his desk and working on some papers, so she does not get to be the witness of the whole thing. Tony hands the brat a box, the lid sporting holes of different shapes, and puts the piece where she can get them without him having to stay away from the blueprints he is eyeing- Peter grabs a little blue plastic square directly out of his hand, tries to squeeze it where the triangle shaped parts should go, and blinks at it for a second before she slips it through the right squared hole and successfully inside the box.

Tony has to make a double take.

He hands her the triangle piece.

She squeezes it on the circle, but then slips it through the right shape.

Then she stares back at him, waiting for the next piece.

“M?”

“Yeah?”

“You said it was okay if you got a normal kid, right?”

“Yeah”

“…You might not have gotten what you asked for. Maybe you should make a complaint and return the package”

Peter slips the plastic circle through the right hole on the first try, and even from his position on the floor, he can hear Mary’s pen dropping to the floor even though the girl is giggling in amusement.

The kid gets older, and Tony realizes he is still waiting for Richard to snap at him. When Rhodey comes by, wearing more medals as time goes by, Tony knows his best friend is also waiting for it to happen, ready to put himself on the line if necessary. He is still waiting for the guy to start laughing a lot less merrily, and to just plain out ask him to stop appearing around his girls anymore. But not even when the kid starts to walk and screams an ‘ONY!’ instead of a ‘papa’ for the first time, the day never comes and Richard’s smile never flatters. He keeps on talking with Tony about their research over coffee, and keeps on asking him to drink coke instead of vodka with him when it looks like things are not going well, he still asks Tony to hold Peter when Mary is out with other friends and it’s his turn to wash the dishes, and he still calls Tony to ask if he would like to have breakfast with them.

But Tony keeps waiting. The thing is, it gets hard, and because it gets hard, he knows is going to hurt more. So he enjoys what time he has left before everything comes to an end.

He doesn’t expect them to knock on his door one Wednesday night.

“Richard?”

“We have something to do” It wasn’t the explanation Tony wanted and needed at that moment, but it was the only explanation they gave as the couple walked into his house, with a bag that was without a doubt Peter’s being left on top of a coach. It was the only explanation he got, and it was nowhere near enough to explain why they looked like they were in such a hurry “At first, the plan was to leave her with Ben and May, but this is the safest place I can think of and there is no time to get Peter to Queens. We already told them”

“What is going on?”

There is silence after that.

The kid is sleeping soundly in her dad’s arms, and the brown curls shine under the lights of his living room, and seems completely oblivious to the heavy silence that has befallen on the three of them. Tony realizes Richard is clenching his jaw and that Mary is trying to tear her eyes away from her daughter, as if she were starved of her sight, as if she was not going to see her ever again and tried to burn the image in her eyes. None of those thoughts helped his situation nor the feeling that was starting to appear on the bottom of his stomach, it didn’t help how Tony suddenly felt cold and how all of his alarms went off. It didn’t help, because Mary looked like she was going to cry, and he had no idea why.

“Tony” But before he could say anything she spoke and turned to him, eyes shining and lips shaking. Her hands were shaking too, and he realized it because she reached out to take his own hands, squeezing them in place like she had not done since she graduated that first time from college. It was different from how she had taken to link her arm with his after becoming someone else’s wide, and it was different than how Richard squeezed his shoulder as he laughed at something lame and nowhere near funny. Mary looked into his eyes and didn’t even seem to blink "You have to promise me something”

He felt his throat closing up, because he had no idea of what was going on and he had no idea of what made her even say that. He wanted to get the truth out of them and to laugh because _of course_ he could fix it- Because Tony could fix anything, he could help them with anything and he could make everything better for Mary.

“I don’t like where this conversation is go-“

She squeezed his hands again.

“Please”

There were a lot of wrong things with that single word.

There were so many that he couldn’t even count them.

So at the end, he just nods.

Mary looked relieved, to the point he could have sworn a tear did escape the corner of her eye, but he was not entirely sure because that’s the moment she pulled him into a hug, arms circling his neck and holding on tightly. He hugged back without even really thinking about it, wondering why Richard looked like he wanted to scream, because Richard _never_ screamed, he hugged back and wondered why it hurt.

“Keep her safe”

“M-“

“Do you promise me?”

He had never promised her anything in his life.

 “I do”

He had never had to do it.

The phone call comes the next day.

“Kiddo?” Tony is holding a cup of coffee, standing beside the little girl drawing in the middle of his living room. He doesn’t have low tables or furniture that is not pointy in all the places a kid could get hurt from, so he has learned a long time ago that it was safer right in the middle of the floor where there were no nearby objects that could suddenly cut very tiny hands. Peter has crayons and papers arranged on her left size by color and size, and a plate of unfinished waffle bits on her right, because Tony is too lazy to cut any of her food so he orders her portions already in the adequate size and ready to eat “Where did you get the idea for this?”

Peter stops drawing, looking up from the (very familiar looking) robot, and as she beams at him he realizes that at least three other drawings are about the same thing.

“From your lab!”

Tony chuckles.

“Thought so”

He hopes Mary does not know this. He hopes she doesn’t because he doesn’t want to explain to her why or when her child had been inside his lab instead of as far away from explosives, weapons and heat as physically possible, as she had very specifically asked of him the few times she had left the baby for Tony (Pepper) to look after. He doesn’t want to explain why there is a baby proof area in a corner of the lower floor.

“Do you have a name for it?”

“I think Mark is pretty”

“It has a nice ring to it. What color do you think would suit him? I am thinking red”

Peter’s smile, if possible, widens even more.

“With some gold!”

Tony tries to hide his own grin with the cup of coffee.

“I like how you think, kid”

Because Peter doesn’t cry and she likes Dum-E and she likes dolls but no more than she likes JARVIS and she doesn’t get scared by the loud music he listens to, so she is an okay child. Rhodey had warned Richard more than once that it was enough how the kid kept on doing things before of her time, ‘We don’t need another one building an engine before even starting elementary school’ he said ‘We shouldn’t let them hang out so much’ he warned, as if that was what Tony and Peter were doing when sitting in the same room- And maybe it was true the engine part, in a way, because they didn’t need another kid doing that. So maybe, if he had the time and if he was sober enough and if he happened to not be busy at the moment, she could teach her how to build a computer instead.

He hears the heels before he sees Pepper. He is amazed at how she doesn’t fall, how she doesn’t trip and how she always looks like wearing heels does not, in fact, hurt like hell, so he is ready to give his compliments when she turns the corner and faces them both. But then he sees her red eyes and the tiny little tears and the phone in her hand, and he cannot do anything else than feeling nothing was going to be okay.

“ _Tony_ ” The man had met Ben and May Parker after Peter was born. A good couple, living in Queens just like Mary’s grandmother. But the May he remembers was always smiling, always happy, not sobbing like she was currently doing from the other side of the line as he holds the phone. There is something taking a hold of his leg and when he looks down its Peter pressing a hand to his side, looking at him with wide brown eyes and a robot drawing on one hand “ _Tony, Richard…. Oh god, Tony, Mary- They-“_

The cup falls and cracks on the floor, but it avoids the girl entirely. Pepper yelps, but she is still crying so she says nothing, and no one moves to do anything at all, and Peter keeps looking at him.

She has her mother’s eyes.

 _This_ , Tony thinks, _is the boiling point._


	2. Chapter 2

Rhodey closes Peter’s door behind him, and he thinks it’s easier going to war.

Pepper stands beside him and looks like she is ready to sign up for the military at any second, as long as she doesn't have to do this ever again. She shakes her head, and when words come out, they sound strangled and perfectly fitting, given the situation at hand.

“She is too much like Mary”

And he doesn’t want to be the one saying it, but he is not the only one to know it. He takes on look at the kid’s face after rushing back all the way from Washington and it’s like being in MIT all over again, jumping over walls and trying to sneak back into the campus after a late night escapade to get ice cream. It hurts in places he is not willing to recognize, and the only thing he can do when he is greeted with a ‘Uncle Rhodey!” as soon as he steps inside Tony’s house is sucking it up and offering the strawberry cake he had to send someone else to buy, because he couldn’t bear to do it himself.

“Have they found the bodies?”

He knows Pepper doesn’t want to be the one to ask either, but someone has to do it- Ben and May Parker are not there, and there is no other inmediate family to care. He knows she has been handling the whole legal aspect for the death of people that were not her family, and he knows she has been drying her eyes through the whole thing. Rhodey wishes he had been able to come earlier, then remembers Peter and her big, brown, Mary eyes and selfishly thinks that maybe its better this way. The man shakes his head in a silent answer and she nods while sniffling.

Rhodey still remembers the day Howard and Maria Stark died.

He thinks this situation is ten times worse.

“How many bottles has opened?”

When Pepper shakes her head at his question, Rhodey doesn’t know what to think.

“He has not drank anything but coffee since we recieved the news”

Or perhaps he does know what to think, he knows exactly what to think. It does not mean, though, that he wants to  _think_ about it or about how Mary didn’t drink and how she didn’t like it when Tony drank and how Tony knew that, and focused on something else.

“Ben and May?”

“They are coming tomorrow”

They both reached the living room, and he lingered close to the stairs leading to Tony’s workshop.

“Has anyone told her?”

Pepper pauses, and she takes a deep breathe.

“She thinks he is upset because of something else”

Rhodey doesn’t want to walk down those stairs after hearing that, but he does, because he has to suck it up and be there for one of his best friends when he couldn’t be at the end for the other. Then, he hears it.

“What are you, a soccer mom?”                          

He misses the last to steps but doesn’t fall on the floor thanks to the hand on the railing, although he is holding himself up with shaky fingers and is aware of how his heart is beating way too fast to any doctor’s liking. He can see the video being played against one of the walls of Tony’s workshop through the crystal wall, but even knowing it’s a video and not the actual person does nothing to steady his fingers as he types in the password and opens the door. Rhodey should have known he was not a hundred percent sure ready for what he was going to see.

Tony is sitting on a chair, and there is something laying open on the table in front of him, but his eyes not on whatever he is working in. The man is looking at the video without blinking, with face devoid of any apparent emotion, but that is where it ends- His eyes is disheveled and its growing hair in parts of his face that should have been clean shaved. There are oil smudges all over his arms, discarded coffee mugs all around him, and Rhodey is willing to bet his carrier Tony has forgotten what a shower even is and how soap smells like. Someone laughs in the background and it’s a welcomed distraction, but when Rhodey turns at the video again he wishes he had just kept on watching Tony and his less than brilliant self, because right there it’s Mary Parker sticking her tongue out at the camera.  

He knows this video.

He knows when it was taken.

So he knows the one who laughed was the person holding the video camera. So he also knows that the person is Richard.

“I am not the one who keeps a scrap book and reveal every single photo I get my hands on, darling”

Rhodey himself appears, wearing a suit and shaking his head.

“He has made a very fair point”

“I was thinking” Tony is wearing graduation garments, and looks pensive as he puts on a pair of sunglasses even though they are indoors. There is drink on his hand, but instead of the very expected alcohol, there is pink thing that Rhodey knows it’s a strawberry smoothie- There is no need to look at Mary’s hand to know she also has one, and there is no need to take a closer to look to know Tony is wearing a blue necktie, looking as if he were not about to receive his latest PhD “How about we make a little detour after this whole thing is done and over with?”

The woman points at him with her smoothie and raises an eyebrow.

“Europe is no little detour”

“I wasn’t thinking about Europe”

“Asia even less little”

“You wouldn’t be complaining if it were the ice cream parlor around the corner”

“I wouldn’t complain if it where the Thai restaurant, either”

Mary taps a finger on the cup she is holding as a grin spreads through her face- When she turns her head he can see the earrings she is wearing, the blue crystals that he had not wanted to know how much they were worth when Tony got them for Mary’s twenty fourth birthday, and what was said next was absolutely lost to him because that’s when Rhodey has to close his eyes to get himself together. He has seen many things throughout his carrier (Many good things, but also, many very bad things), he has felt proud as he stood in front of his country’s flag feeling like it was the right thing to do, and he has tried to inspire new recruits through heartfelt words and sincerity, but no amount of patriotism or love for America can compare to the look he can see on Tony’s face in that video as he shares Mary’s grin.

Because it’s unreasonable of him to want to see it again, when all he had felt when he witnessed it in flesh was momentarily pity for what would probably always be a relationship no one (not even himself) could ever understand, since it was probable Tony was never going to look at someone in that way again.

"They were being chased"

Rhodey snaps his eyes away from the video even before it was paused. Tony was not looking at the screen anymore, instead, he was looking at the object laying in front of him. Rhodey realized it was a bag, a very familiar bag- Actually, he would have bet it was Peter’s bag, but the situation was too bizarre for his mind to wrap around the whole thing just yet.

"What?"

“Last month” Tony fiddled with the insides, checking the pockets and the bottom, and didn’t look up from it even once "The people who broke into their house, they didn't take anything, they were looking for one specific thing” When he didn’t seem to find anything, the man pushed aside the empty bag and reached for something on the floor. The Colonel really didn’t know how to feel when he Tony holding Peter’s panda, pocking at pushing at the whole toy without looking at him even once “What was it that Richard said? ‘They wouldn’t find it here’. Then where?"

"Tony"

"She said she was safer with me than with Ben" Rhodey sort of remember the look Tony has on his face right now. He remembers 72+ hours with no sleep and more than thirteen pots of coffee, and he remembers a teenager running on caffeine and adrenaline and the ideas his way too smart brain was coming up with at three in the morning. He remembers it because it was the first time Rhodey saw for himself what a genius looked like- He remembers because it was the first time in his life he saw a person being sucked by their passions to the point of no return. Rhodey remembers all of that, and because he does, he doesn’t like what he is seeing, but his best friend is already pouring out his brain’s line of thinking "Why would she say that? They live in Queens, but it's not like they have serial killers walking down the streets. What kind of protection does a child need?" 

Clearly, he couldn’t have seen If Tony had found something, but he could know it, because the second Tony’s fingers happened upon something inside the stuffed animal, his other hand shot out to grab at something on his desk.

Rhodey could have screamed when he saw the scissors.

“Ton-“

“Unless” Said main continued, cutting away the stitches holding the Panda’s leg attached to the body as if it weren’t strange in the least. Rhodey rushed to his side, reaching out to take the toy away from Tony, but when he got close enough to actually tough any of them the billionaire reached inside the fake leg and pulled something out. There was nothing but silence around them the handful of seconds it took Rhodey to register he was seeing a key, and that said key had been hiding inside a three year old’s toy "Unless she had something else with her"

Rhodey remembers the first time someone offered to buy Richard and Mary’s research. He remembers the first time someone offered to fund it. He remembers the first time a newspaper published an article wondering if a couple of scientist with brilliant minds could be closer to perfecting the human race than any other person in the history of the world.

He remembers the first time he thought that much attention was not good.

“How long have you been thinking about this?”

In retrospective, he could have asked something worse. Rhodey could have asked why he was even thinking about it, or he could have asked how he even knew something else was going on, when they had to proof more than a promise and a selection of words any worried parent would have chosen, but the thing is, Rhodey already knows the answer to that one. He knows the answer because he knows that people thought he understood Tony more than Tony understood himself, which was true most part of the time, but the thing also is, no one really knew that Tony knew Mary more than Rhodey knew Tony- Rhodey takes one look at the key on his best friend’s hands and against everything his very religious mother has thought him as a child, he silently curses the other, the one who they have to bury, the one he can see on her child’s face and eyes, because _goddamit Mary, you shouldn’t have let it come this far._

Rhodey has known since college that it was unfair to blame her for everything.

It was unfair to say she was the one at fault, and it was also very unfair to say she was the one playing a guy while marrying another. That’s not what happened, and it would have been easier if it had been the case, but it wasn’t and so it was hard to wish he had intervened with the situation before it came to this. It was unfair to blame Mary for the matching clothes and the ice cream and the photos and blue phones and the kid currently sleeping on the floor above them and the key and the dark, dark, dark look on Tony’s face, because Rhodey knows that if his best friend had not walked right into the abyss with his eyes wide open then nothing would have been the same.

"Someone killed Mary" Tony doesn’t whisper his words, and if he could just scream them to the whole world, he probably would. He didn’t scream, and he didn’t reach for the bottle, and he didn’t move "And for that, I am going to kill them"

* * *

 

When he hears Pepper walking down the stairs, Tony shoves the panda and the bag under the table and places the key calmly on his desk, because it’s a very unremarkable object and it immediately looks like any other trinket he has laying around. He will get someone to fix the stuffed animal before its owner wakes up and guilt starts to fill his gut, but for the time being he just accepts the mug of coffee his assistant hands him and wishes it were a shot of tequila. He doesn’t want to think about what kind of memories stepping anywhere near the not so ‘mini’ mini bar, but he kind of regrets it when Pepper glances at the paused video JARVIS is still projecting against the wall and does everything and anything he can to avoid his own eyes following the same path.

She does not stay silent for long.

“We have to talk about it”

Tony feels, more than sees, how Rhode flinches.

He himself feels like wanting to avoid the topic altogether.

They all know what ‘it’ means. It’s obvious they do, because even though Pepper doesn’t elaborate, she looks like she has not slept in days and the topic is doing nothing but taking years off her life spam, and it’s not like Tony can blame her. He sees the folder she is holding and he curses his own mind for knowing exactly what it is and for being able to remember the exact second Robert Herrera placed it in front of him a minute after arriving to his doorstep like the very professional and very well paid lawyer that he was.

“ _The last update to their Will was two years ago_ ”

He hears the words echo in his mind, and Tony wishes he could forget them.  

“ _I doubt Ben wants to do much with their apartment until the kid is eighteen. Why not wait until they get here to tell them yourself?_ ”

“ _Mr. and Mrs. Parker indicated in that should something happen to them, the first person upon whom their daughter’s guardianship falls, is you_. _Child Services were notified and shall not take action until these personal affairs are settled. Should you not desire to accept this terms_ ” And the guy had said it so carefully, but at the same time, so very much to the point, that there was no doubt it was a conversation he has had before. He doesn’t imagine Richard having something to say against it, and it makes it worse “ _Benjamin and May Parker are to be named her guardians_ ”

“You are never in one place” Pepper keeps her voice as neutral as it was possible, and he appreciated the sentiment. No one needed to be told how useless and hopeless they would be at raising a genius child, even if you had been a genius child yourself “You wake up at noon, you have a new woman over every week, you drink more alcohol and coffee than you drink water, and when you start working on something you even forget to eat. I don’t know how many guards you were planning on assigning to her while you are away travelling or when you are passed out in the pool, but there is no reason you cannot assign them to Ben and May’s house instead- Even then, there would be no need for a nanny”

A nanny was the kind of thing Howard did. He had one right up until he was fourteen and graduated early from high school, though he had to admit it was never the same person- He had a habit of making people either love him or hate him, and having to live with him and deal with his brain and his teenage angst made his nannies more likely to very much dislike his guts.

Appointing a full time nanny was the kind of thing a guy who didn’t even want to be a dad did.

“I know she said you had to keep her safe. I know it. But you have to know there are more ways to do that“

He closes his eyes, and he remembers Mary’s face when Richard gave Tony their daughter. He remembers her momentary relief, and he remembers the teary smile she gave him before stepping out of the door. He should have stopped them then, he should have at least point out that he wasn’t the kind of guy you wanted to leave your kids with, maybe even tell her that she was the only one in the world who thought he was that good of a person only because he tried to be when it came to her.

He should have said something.

“I think we all agree there is nothing to talk about at all”

* * *

 

When May looks at Peter, she bursts in tears.

No one has the heart to stop her, not even Pepper, who has polished her acting skills around the child for the last three days and even managed to convince herself that everything was fine and there was no reason to worry Peter more than she had already been when she saw Tony dropping his favorite coffee mug. Ben stands on the doorway and takes a deep, steady breathe, but does not move for at least three whole minutes as he takes in the image of his niece being embraced by his wife in what has to be the

“Auntie?” Her voice is Tiny, but it’s and it pronounces every single word with sheer innocence “Does your tummy hurt?”

It only makes May cry harder.

Tony knows all of this because he sees it through the security footage.

And he is doing it this way for the same reason he has barely stepped out of his workshop for over three days.

Tony Stark is a coward.

It’s easier, he thinks darkly, when Peter is asleep. The furniture of her room was chosen by Pepper and the walls were painted by Richard and the stuffed animals were sent my Rhodey and she is happy so sleep there, so happy and so contently that she does not notice when he sneaks in and makes sure the curtains are closed, like Mary always told him he needed to do- It’s easier because her nose is and mouth and ears are all Richard, it’s easy because at night is hard to see her curly hair, and it’s easy because she cannot do anything to remind him that she is the kind of smart he was. Because he goes and makes JARVIS play every single footage that has Mary on it, he goes and figures out what happened to her, goes and plans in extreme detail the death of whoever was responsible, goes and thinks of ways to find said person, but stops himself the second his feet take him to where Peter is, which has happened no small amount of times. Because he can see Mary’s picture and her hear voice and plan revenge but he cannot, for the life of him, face the only person in this world that has the same eyes as she did.

This is not the kind of reason he can give the lawyer. It wasn’t the kind of thing to say out loud, to tell Pepper or Rhodey or Ben or May, because chances were, it was already common knowledge.

So he gives orders to JARVIS. Bodyguards’ information, houses in Queens fit for a family of three, the kind of schools he was sent to and definitely didn’t need, college fund, health insurance. Richard and Mary didn’t own as much as he did, but they were brilliant in their own right, respected by the scientific community- Peter is entitled to things she can use her mind to make a difference with, and she was going to get every single thing her parents deserved.

When Ben knocks on his door, Tony knows he is trying to keep calm about the whole thing.

“You don’t need to do all of this”

“You are right, I don’t. JARVIS, make sure it’s all done and delivered to Pepper”

“Yes, sir”

“Tony” The man pauses and looks back at Ben “We can take care of her”

And he doesn’t know what it is, but there is _something_ about those words that don’t sit well with him. He knows Ben is talking about money, about comfort, but even though he knows it Tony still has to speak through gritted teeth when he answers.

“I know you can”

He doesn’t let himself go down that path.

_I think we all agree there is nothing to talk about at all_

So he baths and repeats that like a mantra. Rhodey is waiting for him in his room with a loaf of bread he forces Tony to eat, and at least twenty bodyguards agency’s information pops up while he is getting dressed- He is not pleased by the amount of quality schools in or near Queens except of Midtown High school, the kind of quality that he is looking for when he spots the DNA model Peter assembled and left almost under his bed as he puts on his shoes, and tells his AI to keep on looking. The reflection on his mirror looks like he feels, like he is trying to be so busy he has no time to think or lament or crumble or anything emotionally related, and it’s as fitting as it’s going to get, so he opens the door and walks down the stairs.

He is a coward, but when this is over and done with, he can afford to be one while simultaneously playing the powerful uncle that lives on the other side of the country.

( _He doesn’t like the thought_ )

The lawyer it’s already there when he strolls on the living room. He is also the first one to notice Tony.

“Have you come to a decision?”

Pepper’s eyes are burning holes in his face as he puts his hands inside his pockets.

“Yeah”

Tony lets his eyes wonder, and immediately knows it was a mistake.

He looks at Peter, and it feels as it were the first time he has seen her in his life, even though he knows her curls are untamable, because he had tried to comb them with his hands on those moments he had nothing better to do while using the child to chase away annoying board members, and even though he knows she prefers fish to meat and yogurt to jelly, because Pepper turns even bolder when the kid is around and forces him to sit down and eat with her and whoever brought the kid to this office and talk about the supremacy of strawberry yogurt over every other single flavor (he doesn’t agree with her, but they both agree on strawberry ice cream, so it’s a win-win situation). She is kneeling on a chair to properly reach the table on which she was currently drawing, (Mary’s) eyes following every line and focusing on where the next one should be.

He looks at Peter, and he doesn’t need films or projectors to remember things, he doesn’t need any image to remember everything so _clearly._ He remembers dinners and he remembers laughing, he remembers ice cream and he remembers blue socks and dresses and ties and jewelry, he remembers the feeling of frozen cold sprite showering him and pool water containing too much chlorine washing away the alcohol in his system- He looks at her, looks at how her eyes observe everything around her in quiet curiosity, and he remembers photos of white coats and interviews with important magazines.

Then, she is looking at him.

“Tony!”

There is panic in the room when she hops down from the chair, obviously wanting to reach him. His wishes to say his feet were glued to the ground, or to the very least, that he was already making his way back to the workshop and away from the kid, but the truth was that as May stood up from the coach, all red eyed, Tony was already walking towards the table.

“Darling, we talked about this” He hears her say, and Peter stops in her tracks “Tony is not feeling too good”

( _It shouldn’t have irked him_ )

 “Oh” The child mumbles, looks back at him for a moment, and nods slowly “Right”

As they are settling themselves in the table, he remembers a crappy hospital room with crappy food and a panda stuffed animal that shouldn’t have been the favorite toy and that he has to call someone to fix, he remembers a name tag sporting a name too long and too familiar. Robert is laying an open folder in front of him, already taking out a fancy pen, and Tony knows he should be looking at the document instead of at the child who was putting in order her drawings as she perched herself again on the chair- He sees a peek of the paper and knows she had been drawing a red and gold robot named Mark flying through the sky.

Pepper clears her throat when he makes no attempts to move, and he remembers a woman smiling down at a bundle of blankets like she had never smiled before, not even to her own husband.

“She loved that child more than she loved anyone else”

Tony looks at Peter, and he can suddenly remember that.

He knows everyone is looking at him, holding their breathes. He can see Rhodey starting to stand up from his chair and Pepper starting to look alarmed, but he doesn’t care and he does not keep on paying them any mind when Peter finally, _finally_ , looks back at him with big brown eyes. She is silent and curious and ready to ask questions, but she says nothing because her aunt it’s already opening her mouth and saying something he could not her and reaching for her.

And that’s pretty much it. He sees May Parker’s hand inching towards the kid, and something inside of Tony just sort of _snaps._

“Pete, come here”

Silence falls upon them all, and it’s heavy with many things, most of them bad, and all of those directed to him. May looks shocked as much as she looks progressively distraught, and even though Ben does not look half as surprised as his wife, there is something in the way he looks taken aback and moderately horrified that makes the silence even worse, but Tony doesn’t really care- He doesn’t care about that, nor at how the lawyer took a deep, settling breathe in hopes of keeping his professional façade _professional_ , nor about how Pepper all but gapes and looks like she is two seconds away from strangling the living lights out him; in Rhodey’s case, the man only closes his eyes and does nothing else than to look as if he had given up entirely on evading this very situation. Tony doesn’t care about any of that, because as soon as the words leave his mouth, Peter looks back at him, gets off her chair and walks in his direction without a second thought.

She is light when he lifts her from under her arms and settles her on his lap, lighter than any piece of tech he has developed or any material he has worked with in his lab, but not as light as the first time he hold her and didn’t know how to put her down, her tiny face angled up to look at him. Deep brown eyes that he knew looked at him and Tony didn’t have to wonder why, even though she was supposed to be the one with no understanding of the situation, she seemed the one who _got it._ He raised a hand, patting a head full of wild brown hair, like the one he had seen for years tied with colorful bandanas, and nodded at her.

Because this was not his child. She wasn’t his flesh and blood, and although she was _smart,_ she wasn’t a Stark- She wasn’t the result of a mistake a man like Tony would have likely made sooner rather than later giving his life style. But it didn’t matter, because Peter was Mary’s.

“Yes, I don’t think we have anything to talk about. Say, kid, do you want to paint your room again?”

So she would be Tony’s.

_Sorry, Richard._


	3. Chapter 3

Pepper is good at multitasking.

Actually, this has always been a fact, but the moment she had taken the position she had as of right now, it had immediately become a necessity. There are never only a _few_ matters to take care of when more just pop out of nowhere, and there are never enough days on the calendar or enough hours in a day to go through everything, but she manages. She is good at multitasking, has mastered its art, and because she is good at multitasking she manages Tony’s schedule for the day (without Tony being involved in any of the meetings he should very much be present in), makes funeral arrangements for a funeral they have no idea when it’s going to be held, tries to find words with which to assure May that everything will be alright, evades and buries Obadiah’s suspicion of anything happening.

Pepper does all of this while simultaneously waiting for Tony to realize this was madness.

Here comes the part where she also is trying very hard not to scream in frustration.

Usually, when her boss makes a reckless decision, something that no one else would dare to do, not even with the amount of money he has, there is an air of smugness to the whole ordeal. Be it his words, his actions, or the way he smirks at her from over his shoulder- There is always something that tells her he _knows_ what he is only allowed to do whatever he wants because of who is, that even if he is not allowed to do it, if he so much wishes for it there isn’t exactly someone that can stop him from doing it anyway. This ego is something she is used to.

She is not used to no smugness at all.

This doesn’t mean she has not seen it before.

When he is working on something in his workshop, the look of a person that’s doing something as easy as breathing, when he is creating and building things no one else can do, and he doesn’t open his mouth or looks up from his project. During those moments, there is no ego and no smugness and no snarky comments or smirks.  When Tony Stark is using the only thing his father didn’t exactly hand him, his brain, he looks almost calm.

That’s what happens when he signs the damn paper and holds Peter in his lap.

He signs the paper and is like he cannot see the multiple reactions around him. He stands up, and holds Peter in his arms, and he doesn’t although he nods at Mary and Ben and invites them to feel at home, to eat and sleep and do whatever they want, he doesn’t apologize for very possibly just breaking their hearts even more. There is a line she is not ready to cross yet, so she turns to Rhodey instead, hoping for someone to dish out the curses and the demands and the ‘Don’t be an idiot Tony’, but the Colonel looks tired and defeated. It almost gets worse when his best friend asks if there is any legal requirement he is expected to fulfill before he starts to take decisions of his own- And she wishes he could be this efficient when it comes to his company, but she takes one look at the kid resting on his hip and she knows it will never be the same.

So yes, thirty minutes later she is the one who has to contact the people in charge on moving Peter's things from her parent's apartment and arrange her in her new-not-new-room, but Tony is the one who tells her to do so, even before the ink has dried on the document and he has officially been the child's guardian for 0.2 seconds.

Pepper feels bad, because she keeps waiting for him to miss something, to do something that proves them right, to reach for a shot instead of water or put Peter down and call for a Nanny. He keeps waiting for Tony mess up.

But he pours the little girl a small glass of juice when Peter asks for it, helps her to drink it while he carries her down to the workshop, and against common sense Pepper feels like that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.

Ben turns down the offer to stay there until more plans are made while May tears up and tries to not hate Tony- The man (excellent husband, brilliant friend, outstanding uncle, best logical option for guardian) looks tired and resigned and just shakes his head when Pepper starts to apologize, because _'Do you see an unwilling child in his arms, Miss Potts? I most certainly don't'_ , and they go through everything with the lawyer before she sends them to Richard and May's apartment with Happy. She contemplates staying outside and getting much needed fresh air after the car has disappeared and she is left with millions of things to handle, but there is a horrible feeling in her gut, and she goes back inside where she hopes she can present a stronger front alongside Rhodey.

When she sees Tony he is on the phone with a chef and nutritionist expert whose number JARVIS found and giving specific instructions as of how many already prepared meals should be delivered every day and how he expected kid's menu and nutritional information in his email every Sunday morning, before launching himself into an almost itemized list of Peter's allergies and the legal measures that would come to existence if he found cinnamon anywhere the kid's food. Pepper realizes with horror that she herself had not reached even 'food' in her list of things they would have to prepare immediately to preserve Peter's life.

(She knows that he knows the child's allergies by heart because they are the same as Mary's, so she feels even worse and doesn't think about the topic ever again)

From that point onwards, it's like watching a snowball rolling down the side of a mountain, becoming bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger with no hopes of stopping.

They are all fresh with grief, and when they realize what Tony is doing, what he has done and what he has been starting to do since he picked up Peter and sat her on his lap, Rhodey sits down with a heavy THUD and runs his hands over his face. Because by the end of the morning there is a list of possible language tutors already compiled and handled, interviews are already set by JARVIS and foreign cartoons are already streaming on their TV. By the end of the afternoon there is a selection of schools for gifted children in Malibu, interactive science related toys ordered by the ton and no small amount of LEGO sets already being unknowingly purchased by a three year old who was shown an online catalogue and told 'What do you want, kid?'. By the end of the day, there were glowy start stickers being placed on the ceiling of Peter's room.

Pepper didn't have to lift a finger for any of that to happen.

So it left her and Rhodey enough time to remember Mary had wanted Peter to speak the Italian Maria Stark had captivated her with many years ago and the Spanish Ben Parker was so proficient in and the French and every other language Tony had mastered like other people master using chopsticks. They remember Richard and Mary going through proposals of schools for their little girl and discussing the pros and cons of sending a young child to school earlier in her life, and their laughter and amused faces as Peter kept on putting together puzzles and lego sets not meant for her age. They remember her parents saying they should buy more star stickers and maybe expanding their ceiling, because nothing was stopping Peter from wanting to learn constellations and complaining they couldn't be seen in the city. They remember all of that, and it takes everything to not scream in frustration when Tony, still holding the child, raised an eyebrow and asked what was wrong.

The thing is, Pepper sees him staring at something, as if he is so deep in thought not even his grief can take a hold of him, and she cannot help but feel that she is not telling her something.

To be honest, she is scared of what that might be.

But then, she sees the little girl and who she eats cookies and drinks juice and draws and builds things that no three year old should be able to even name, and Pepper knows she is not the only one being kept in the dark. She wonders if Peter has asked anyone where her parents are, since she has not heard about it, and prays from that little selfish spot in her heart that she never does. It’s a conversation no one in that house was prepared to have.

Then, two days later, they get the news that Mary and Richard's bodies have been found and Pepper can only think _this is it_.

Tony takes a deep breathe, feels the heaviness on his chest as it expands, and hates every second of it. It’s like swallowing acid and having to throw it up- His knuckles are bloodless, his throat is dry, his eyes are not. They are red and they are heavy and they just want to shut down, because maybe when he opens them again, he will find that everything was nothing more than him being delirious due to the amount of hours he had spent without sleeping. But he knows that won’t happen, just like it didn’t happen when Jarvis died or when his mom didn’t come back, and so he curls his fingers around the key in his pocket.

“Prepare the jet”

There are a couple of things he is aware of.

First, Tony is aware that he doesn’t have a plan.

But he has a very good idea of what he is doing. So he dispatches instructions even before he hops in the shower- Mary and Richard’s apartment in Queens is to be investigated and kept under lock down, just like he had done with the one in Malibu not too far from his own house, with the exception of Ben and May’s presence. He specifically asks for key holes to be found, he specifically asks for the capture of any shady person that comes too close and looks to suspicious.

The second thing he is aware of, is that this is probably the last time Peter will be this calm about riding a plane.

Every time he looks up from the laptop opened in front of him, his eyes travel to the little girl. She is seated beside Rhodey, chattering away about something he cannot hear- His best friend looks sad when he thinks Peter is not looking at him, and both solemn and caring when she is, because he is ‘Uncle Rhodey’, and at least he knows how to act like it. He Tony knows Pepper is looking at him in the same way they had all glared since he signed the documents, constantly reminding of the things that Tony didn’t want to face, but had to.

Because he was also aware of the fact that it was up to him to tell Peter.

He looks back at the computer, at his research about possible enemies and clues, and swallows hard.  

It doesn’t get better when they step in the hotel, and as the staff rushes to comply to their sudden reservation, Pepper asks if he wants her to stay with Peter. The girl is holding on his hand and looking everywhere, oblivious to all the worries and all the ‘what ifs’, and so trusting it almost made him sick- She never asked, she never said no, she never questioned _why_ he was the one pouring her juice and giving her food instead of her _dad_. He didn’t want anything more than saying ‘Yes’ and passing on the responsibility to her, like he was used to.

“No, I got it”

But it wasn’t _Pepper_ the child’s _mother_ had asked to take care of Peter.

“Look!” She whisper-shouts when they walk in their room and runs to the far end of it while Tony considers reaching for at least one shot of tequila out of the mini bar, nose pressed against the window of the suite and hands already leaving prints on the surface. New York expands on the other side of the glass, and she points at the orange colors on the sky and the sun quickly disappearing over the horizon “It looks like a sea of orange juice!”

He finds it in himself to chuckle.

“You really like that stuff, don’t you?”

Peter laughs.

Tony feels like screaming.

He orders room service instead.

The thing is, as the kid grew up, he had expected more than once for her to burst into tears and annoy the hell out of him.

When she learned how to walk and mostly fell on her behind, or when it rained and there were thunder, or when she was sick and felt miserable and was spilling fluids all over his sofa as Mary tended to her, but it never happened, and Tony started to learn that it made the whole thing easier- If he had to share his time with Mary, then he would take the curious and bubbly and snotty brat over any other crying baby. He entertained the thought of asking if it was normal, but then discarded it when he remembered that Peter was Mary’s daughter, so even if it weren’t normal it wouldn’t make much difference.

But he wasn’t Uncle Tony anymore. Not that he ever was, but still. The Uncle who was never called uncle by the baby who insisted on calling him by his name instead, but learned how to act like one.

He keeps that in mind when she walks out of the bathroom and he only has to point out that her pajama shirt is backwards. There is no small amount of dread when it becomes clear that he has to be the one to help, and no small amount of awkwardness when he does, head turned completely to the side.

By the time he too has changed, and made phone calls to make sure his instructions are being carried out, Tony is completely drained. He entertains the idea of leaving the talk for another day for a grand total of seven seconds, until Peter gets under the covers, looks up at him, and finally, _finally_ says:

“We shouldn’t tell Mama we came here. She doesn’t like hotels!”

It’s like a stab to the gut.

Tony really wishes, for a split of second, that he was a better man. The kind of man that keeps things from people if only for the sake of sparing their feelings. Maybe he will become that man one day, but because it still hurts to breath and hurts but not to see her brown eyes, and because the day after tomorrow they have to wear black and he has to hold Peter’s hand again, he tells her.

_Peter never cried._

So when he explained the situation to her and she did, it was like she was making up for all those moments in which, as a kid, she was entitled to cry but didn't do it. He does the only sensible thing he is capable of doing as the egocentric piece of shit he feels like, and holds her as if he had never hold her before.

She stops crying only when she has exhausted herself to the point of falling asleep on him.

And the thing also is, he doesn’t have a plan. He doesn’t have a plan, but Tony knows what he has to do.

_He has to kill whoever killed Mary._

He knows how to do this.

The child in his arms shifts, a tired mumble escaping her lips. If he concentrates he can still feel some tears running down her cheeks and into his shirt, and he is not entirely sure with his now frozen hand, so he taps mindlessly at the mattress under him, when he should be instead patting a small head full of brown curls.

**_He knows what he has to do._ **

_He has to keep Peter safe._

This, he doesn’t know how to do. 

* * *

 

He sends Rhodey to the apartment the next day when, as Peter sniffs and burst out in tears when she sees Pepper, it becomes clear that stepping out of the suit would be considered as running away.

He spends most of the morning just sitting awkwardly on a chair, ordering food that goes untouched by either of them and holding himself from opening the laptop- Pepper has not stopped glaring at him since she dried the first tears, and he knows that she is very likely to kill him if he does anything not related to the crying kid in the room. When she is able to coax Peter into at least drinking a glass of water, she hisses at him like a snake.

“You could have done it in a different way”

“I could have not done it at all, give me some credit”

The only reason she doesn’t straight out kill him right there and then, was because Peter sniffs loudly, face wet with all sorts of fluid, and clings to his side on the couch once more. He tenses and doesn’t move a muscle, only cursing internally when Pepper shakes her head and walks out of the room, typing away and mumbling things about doing something useful while she makes sure that his company doesn’t crumble, as usual. He wants to scream traitor, but he can’t- He wants to move, but he can’t.

So he closes his eyes and waits for anything to happen.

When he gets it, he wishes he had never asked for it in the first place.

“Tony” The mumble comes from his left, where his shirt and pants are completely soaked with tears and other things he doesn’t want to think much about. Peter doesn’t cry like Mary, and it’s almost a relief to see that- Her eyes and face are red, swollen and tired, and it’s not a look any kid should have. She stares up at him, more tears slipping off her eyes “I want Papa- I… I-I want Mama” Her voice breaks halfway through, sobs wrecking once more her small body. Tony doesn’t know how anyone could possibly think he wasn’t the least fit person to protect someone so small, or to protect anyone at all, he doesn’t know why he is sitting in this couch instead of drinking whiskey and why he is taking a deep breathe instead of standing up and walking away, or calling a nanny- It was the only example he only got from his father, it was the only thing he remembers people doing to him.

He is like Howard Stark in more ways than one. In businesses and in life and in his relationships with women and his relationship with alcohol.

_“Actually, I believe I know your dad’s name, not yours. Seems like a pretty big difference right there”_

Tony closes his eyes.

_Damn you, Mary._

His hand is patting Peter’s head before he opens them again. He pats her head, and then her back, and then she is up in his arms and clinging to his neck. It’s a small, breakable body belonging to a small, and breakable child- He remembers holding her from the first time, and is glad that at least now he is not wearing Armani.

“Me too, Peter”

He puts off the reports for the rest of the day.

The morning after, it’s Rhodey the one standing up in front of a crowd of people, dressed in black and sporting his medals with heaviness, making a speech Tony wasn’t even asked to prepare. He knows it is better this way, so he doesn’t say anything about it and just shuts up. His brain is working overtime so to ignore the two coffins in front of them- He thinks about the untouched apartment and no report of any suspicious key holes, he thinks about the reporters being held out of the way by security and reminds himself that he has to go over a list of qualified bodyguards, he thinks about suspicious people and things yet to be investigated.

He most certainly does not think of brown eyes and red bandanas around brown curls.

If he picks up a sniffing Peter and goes back to the hotel before the service is done, there was no one to blame it on his clenched jaw as much as the tired and distraught kid in his arms.

“The media knows you came to New York” Pepper stand with red rimmed eyes, once more, for once looking like she is not planning on murdering him on his sleep. She is watching as Peter plays with her food, at least trying to concentrate on the cartoons playing on the TV “They have pictures of you and Peter”

Tony also watches the kid.

He thinks of an empty apartment and the key on his pocket. He thinks about suspicious people and the report on his email he has yet to open.

_He doesn’t have a plan._

“Let them”

But Tony knows what he has to do.

He has to set a trap, and catch a mouse.


End file.
